Water

It's all around me. I can hear it. There is no hiding from it. It rises and falls and rises and falls.  But each time it rises, and each time it falls, it stays just a little higher than it did before. Before too long, it will engulf this tiny island. Before too long, any trace of this island will disappear.  

We should have listened to our forefathers. We should have listened when they told us our consumerist ways would eventually destroy us and our planet. And now I am the only one left to see what has become of us. 

Sure. The rich and powerful and lucky made it off this planet and are orbiting in luxury starships. Hoping for a day when the waters recede and they can come back and destroy what's left. But the rest of us?  Or go in search of other planets to inhabit  and likely destroy.  They wont have learned to curb their habits.  The working stiffs who rarely had two dimes to rub together. Who couldn't afford to grease the palm of some bureaucrat to get a spot on one of those "star liners"?  We were left behind to witness the final destruction of the chunk of rock we called home for tens of thousands of years. 

Reduce, reuse, recycle. What a joke. All that did was slow down the inevitable. It still caused ozone destroying gasses when the recycling factories went to work. Before all the ice melted and the waters rose, the gasses caused temperature increases. Summer lasted 365 days a year (366 in a leap year).  It was such fun to go to the beach in February. For the first couple of years. Then reality set in. Food shortages became the norm. Prices rose. Somehow the rich kept getting richer, but the poor - we got poorer. Farms were all bought up and turned into factory farms and corporate farms. Farmers couldn't afford to keep running their farms without the corporate payouts. 

Once the food supply started getting more and more scarce, rationing became the norm. After that, synthesizing became how we ate. There was very little food in our food. It was synthesized to look like something, but was little more than some vitamins and nutrients mixed together with something to hold them together and called "chicken-like" or "beef-like". Especially after all the animals died. It wasn't uncommon after the last cow died, to find domestic animals on restaurant menus.  You learned quickly not to think of your old dog Sparky when you were at the diner eating "meat-like loaf". 

And now, here I am, writing what will likely be my last words.  The water has gotten even higher now. It's around my knees. I can't get to any higher ground. There is no higher ground. I'm at the top of the tallest building. I'm writing this and putting it in a plastic zipper bag in the hopes that someone someday will find it. Maybe they'll learn from our mistakes and treat this planet better than we did. 

For now, I can only hope that if the starships are heading to the planet our researchers studied when it became apparent we would need to leave our home, that they treat the new world with more respect than they did this one. 

That is my hope for this new planet.
That is my hope for Earth.